Seattle summers are beautiful, but the autumn here is my absolute favorite. Too bad it seemed to last for a total of five days.

When I first moved to Seattle from upstate New York, I laughed at all the Pacific Northwest weaklings. I hail from 16 years in Rochester, New York, which was ranked #2 for snowiest city last year. #1 and #3 (Syracuse and Buffalo, respectively) are within a stone's throw of Rochester as well. Average yearly snowfall is close to 100 inches and our biggest storm (2002) brought in a whopping 20 inches while the coldest day in the past decade gauged a temp of -11.9 degrees (2004). You don't really know winter misery until you've lived here - shoveling and scraping ice off of your car every morning, waiting for the bus at 6 AM in the bitter cold and freezing wind/snow, sludging through slush from snow that comes as early as October and sometimes continues on until mid-April. You're not even guaranteed a good amount of snow days because a town like this comes equipped to handle snow with handy snowplows, salt machines to melt it down on the roads, and a blase attitude toward snow piles that could smother you in an impromptu avalanche.

Whenever I visited my cousins for Christmas in Oregon, I would relish the warm winters here. When I went to University of Washington, I'd usually wear flip-flops until November.

But...a few years in Seattle ruined me. When I went back east for school in Ohio, I couldn't stand the winters there even though it wasn't nearly as cold or snowy as New York. Bowling Green, Ohio, had its share of winter misery though. It's as flat as a pancake there and there's no wind cover at all, which makes it nearly impossible to walk against the wind. You can jump up vertically and land somewhere a few feet away without trying just because of the strong winds. There are days where people are advised not to be outside for more than a few minutes because the wind chill can cause frostbite. I used to have policemen stop by the side of the road to ask me if I needed a ride when they saw me walking to school.

So you'd think that moving to Seattle would be a piece of cake after all that. Unfortunately, my years in Ohio and New York to Seattle were buffered by two years in sunny southern California. And now I find myself shivering at night and cursing the cold. The days here are still delicious autumn, but it gets downright chilly in the night.

It was so cold that I broke down and went to a local home repair shop to see if there was something I could get to insulate my windows. The guys there recommended a home insulation kit, which turned out to be double-sided tape and plastic sheeting. Basically, you tape plastic over your windows and use a blow dryer to shrink-wrap the plastic to fit over the windows. (I didn't have a blow-dryer so I waved around my mini-heater). As I was putting the plastic wrap up, a sliver of a doubt came into my mind as I inwardly wondered, "Does putting up this thin plastic wrap actually do anything?" And that night, I got my answer: "No...No, it really doesn't."

Luckily, my electric blanket does wonders and I bought an electric heater to help when it gets even colder in the winter. And when I go outside, I'll just look like this:

I started the post today meaning to talk about how I masqueraded as a highschool student today, but I got a bit sidetracked. I guess that will have to wait for later.